5 July 2013NSA leaks: UK blocks crucial espionage talks between US and EuropeFirst talks to soothe transatlantic tensions to be restricted to data privacy and Prism programme after Britain and Sweden's veto
By Ian Traynor
The Guardian

José Manuel Barroso, the European commission president,
and Dalia Grybauskaitė, Lithuania's president, have backed down from
initial demands of two strands of dialogue with the Americans. Photograph:
Valda Kalnina/EPA

Britain has blocked the first crucial talks on intelligence and
espionage between European officials and their American counterparts
since the NSA surveillance scandal erupted.

The talks, due to begin in
Washington on Monday, will now be restricted to issues of data privacy
and the NSA's Prism programme following a tense 24 hours of negotiations
in Brussels between national EU ambassadors. Britain, supported only by
Sweden, vetoed plans to launch two "working groups" on the espionage
debacle with the Americans.

Instead, the talks will consist of one working group focused on the
NSA's Prism programme, which has been capturing and storing vast amounts of internet
and mobile phone metadata in
Europe.

The talks on Prism and data privacy have been arranged to coincide with the trade talks in
an attempt to defuse the transatlantic tension. EU diplomats and
officials say the offer of talks by the Americans is designed to enable
the leaders of Germany and France to save face following revelations
about the scale of US espionage – particularly in Germany, but also of
French and other European embassies and missions in the US.

Other aspects of the dispute, such as more traditional spying and
intelligence matters, will be off limits for the Europeans after Britain
insisted the EU had no authority to discuss issues of national security
and intelligence.

"It was decided. It finished successfully," said Dalia Grybauskaitė,
the president of Lithuania, which has just assumed the EU's six-month
rotating presidency and which mediated the sensitive talks in Brussels
over the past two days.

On Thursday, Grybauskaitė said the Europeans hoped to hold two
separate strands of consultations with the Americans. By Friday she and
José Manuel Barroso, the European commission president, conceded that
the intelligence strand had been dropped. "Intelligence matters and
those of national security are not the competence of the EU," he said,
echoing the UK's objection.

Senior EU diplomats, officials, and government ministers confirmed
that Britain opposed most of the rest of the EU on joint European talks
with the Americans on intelligence and espionage, meaning that national
governments will need to pursue the issues separately with Washington.

"The consultations in Washington will first of all address data
protection matters. Addressing the intelligence topic is not expected,"
said a senior Lithuanian official.

The Lithuanian government phoned Carl Bildt, Sweden's foreign
minister, on Thursday evening to try to remove the Swedish resistance,
but failed, sources said. The talks in Brussels continued throughout the
night as diplomats sought to come up with wording that would keep
everyone happy.

Officials said the abortive attempt to come up with a common European
position only served to highlight the divisions that have surfaced as a
result of the espionage scandal, with the Europeans against the
Americans, the French and the Germans against the British, and leading
pro-EU figures arguing that the fiasco has underlined the case for
Europe constructing its own cyber-defences.

"We need our own capacities, European cloud computing, EU strategic
independence," said Michel Barnier, the French politician and European
commissioner for the single market.

Such is the transatlantic and intra-European disarray over the
espionage wars, that senior east and west European politicians and
intelligence veterans privately suspect a Russian role in the
intelligence row. They point to the presence of the NSA
whistleblower, Edward Snowden – apparently still at Moscow's
Sheremetyevo airport – and to the controversy surrounding the Bolivian
presidential plane. President Evo Morales, travelling from Moscow, was
forced to land in Vienna after being denied permission to enter the
airspace of several EU countries.

The surveillance dispute led to calls, particularly from France, for
the long-awaited negotiations on a transatlantic free trade pact to be
delayed. The simultaneous opening of talks on the NSA, Prism and
surveillance is designed to mute such calls and give European leaders an
opportunity to climb down while claiming concessions from the Americans,
EU diplomats said.